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Robert Burns (1759-1796)

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25 FARMER, POET, LOVER, EXCISEMAN ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796) liza Fay discovers to her chagrin that her husband is devoid of both good sense and Efidelity; Robert Burns, though unable to wed a woman who satisfies his intellectual as well as his emotional and physical needs, finds in marriage a happiness he does not expect. Luckily for Burns, the son of a poor tenant farmer in Ayrshire, education is more valued and more widespread in Scotland than in England, and his father sends him to a country schoolmas- ter, who introduces him to English and Scots lit- erature and teaches him French, though not the Latin drilled into the sons of gentlemen. He goes on to win a local reputation, and then national fame, for poems written in Scots, some of them directed against the reactionary party in the Presbyterian Kirk, while he creates a record of his life in letters written, and well written, in standard English. A few of the letters sketch characters like the “flesh-disciplining god- ly matron” who fears Burns is but “a rough an’ roun’ Christian” and pic- ture scenes like the drinking party at which all knelt while the poet “as priest, repeated some rhyming nonsense.” However, his principal achieve- ment as a correspondent is to share his wide-ranging emotions, which are usually strong and often stormy. From passages often enriched by literary allusions and a wealth of metaphor and simile, we learn of his conviviality, his amorousness, his oscillating feelings about human nature, his esteem for personal honesty and independence of mind, his love of liberty, his Scottish patriotism, his fury against the bigotry of some (not all) of the cler- gy, and his love of poetry. Burns endures a tussle between his sceptical rea- son and his needy heart, and between his amorous passions and his painful guilt for impregnating a number of women. At the age of twenty-two, the young farmer writes to his father, William Burns, “I foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me,” and he thanks that devout man for his “lessons of virtue and piety.” The FROM FAMILY TO PHILOSOPHY turning point in his life comes in 1786, when, in despair at losing Jean Armour, a girl of Mauchline in Ayrshire, he accepts a post as overseer on a Jamaican estate. Before leaving, he decides that he will have his verse published in the provincial town of Kilmarnoch. Surprised by the applause his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect receives, he rides to Edinburgh on a borrowed pony and is acclaimed as a wonder, a supposed “Heaven-taught ploughman” as the man of letters Henry Mackenzie dubs him. In the cap- ital, he enjoys a lavish social life and mixes with aristocrats and intellectu- als, but writes to the physician and author John Moore, “I know very well the novelty of my character has by far the greatest share in the learned and polite notice I have lately had.” Burns has a lively awareness that fame is no guarantee of a liveli- hood, and while he has the opportunity of a post in the Excise, he speaks of agriculture as “the only thing of which I know anything,” and after much hesitation, he leases a farm in a picturesque area near Dumfries from one of his admirers, Patrick Miller. In 1787, before occupying it, he goes on expeditions in both the Highlands and the Lowlands and ventures into the north of England. His love of his country appears in his letters. From Stirling, he writes to an Ayrshire friend: This morning I knelt at the tomb of Sir John the Graham, the gallant friend of the immortal Wallace; and two hours ago I said a fervent prayer for old Caledonia over the hole in a blue whinstone, where Robert de Bruce fixed his royal standard on the banks of Bannockburn; and just now, from Stirling Castle, I have seen by the setting sun the glorious prospect of the windings of Forth through the rich carse of Stirling, and skirting the equally rich carse of Falkirk. Unfortunately, Robert Burns uses much of the earnings from his book to prop up his brother Gilbert, who is still farming in Ayrshire, leaving himself with insufficient funds to stock his own ground. For this reason, among others, his farm fails. He has prudently taken the precaution of studying to qualify as an Excise officer: “I thought,” he explains, referring to the modest salary, “five-and-thirty pounds a-year was no baddernier res- sort for a poor poet, if Fortune in her jade tricks should kick him down from the little eminence to which she has lately helped him up.” In September 1789, Burns begins to work as a revenue officer on a part-time basis. In this incongruous role, the poet can display both compas- sion and severity. He writes of “rascally creatures” who are “nearly ruined, as all smugglers deserve, by fines and forfeitures,” but on another occasion he observes, “I recorded every defaulter, but at the court I myself begged 236 ROBERT BURNS off every poor body that was unable to pay.” He can also “wish and pray that the goddess of justice herself would appear tomorrow among our hon. gentlemen, merely to give them a word in their ear that mercy to the thief is injustice to the honest man.” The diligence he brings to his office is evi- dent in suggestions he makes for the improvement of the service. Thus, he has a loophole closed by which liquor imported into his division is exempt from duty diminishing the revenue and facing local brewers with unfair competition. In 1791, as a full-time Excise officer, he is able to surrender the lease on his farm and move to Dumfries, where his cultural life extends to enjoyment of professional theatre. While Burns is still living in Edinburgh, he is charmed to meet re- fined and educated ladies, especially Mrs. Agnes M’Lehose, who is sepa- rated from her husband and whom he poetically nicknames Clarinda. In February 1788, after visiting Jean Armour the master mason’s daughter of Mauchline who is about to bear his twins, he writes to this lady: I, this morning, as I came home, called for a certain woman. I am disgusted with her. I cannot endure her. I, while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with my Clarinda: ’twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender Passion. I have done with her, and she with me. But Jean, pregnant by Burns for the second time, is cast out by her family, and by the end of April a letter to his old Ayrshire friend James Smith jo- vially discloses his marriage to this “clean-limbed, handsome, bewitching young hussy of your acquaintance.” From now on, he refers to her as Mrs. Burns. In several letters, he alludes to Jean Armour’s plight, his own conduct in rising to the occasion, and his unanticipated reward: I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature’s happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a deposit. Nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the county. 237 FROM FAMILY TO PHILOSOPHY Although she reads only the Bible, her husband’s poems, and Scottish bal- lads, she is an excellent singer. Guilt-stricken, as he well might be, by the il- licit pregnancies he is responsible for, Burns finds to his relief that he seems to have left fornication behind, and he hopes that “the little poetic licences of former days will of course fall under the oblivious influence of some good-natured statute of celestial prescription.” Tragically, he has at least one lapse when Jean is away from home, and his victim, a barmaid at a local inn, dies in childbirth. The incident does not figure in the extant cor- respondence, but from other sources, it is known that Jean was so forgiving and compassionate as to raise the newborn girl with her own children. She is said to have once exclaimed, “Robert needs two wives.” While Burns remains devoted to his plebeian spouse, he continues to be emotionally excited by ladies who are out of reach. To his upper class friend Mrs. Dunlop, he defends “the sacred purity” of his attachment to her neighbour Miss Lesley Baillie, even as he exclaims, “do you not know that I am almost in love with an acquaintance of yours?—Almost! said I—I am in love, souse! over head and ears, deep as the most unfathomable abyss of the boundless ocean.” Sending his poem “Craigieburn Wood” to the an- thologist George Thompson, he confesses: “The lady on whom it was made [Miss Jean Lorimer] is one of the finest women in Scotland; and, in fact (en- tre nous), is in a manner to me what Sterne’s Eliza was to him—a mistress, a friend, or what you will, in the guileless simplicity of Platonic love.” After Burns withdraws from Edinburgh in 1788, he complains to one of the friends he has left behind: I am here on my farm, busy with my harvest; but for all that most pleasurable part of life called SOCIAL COMMUNICATION, I am here at the very elbow of existence.
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